Two women who have been the subject of floods of contemptuous and dismissive abuse as part of their public life write about their experiences and point out that their experience is the cultural norm, not any outlier experience.

The world needs a social justice version of John Baez’ classic simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics AKA The Crackpot Index, to rate our never-ending “feedback” from troglodytes of assorted stripes who are convinced that not only are we Doin It Rong but that we deserve to be threatened into silence for daring to have an opinion in the first place.

A short while ago Anita Sarkeesian published another video to her Feminist Frequency YouTube channel. Within an hour it was taken down by YouTube because it had been flagged as containing objectionable content. Feminist Frequency appealed the takedown, and it was quickly restored. Good on YouTube for restoring the video so quickly, but why doesn’t YouTube have a better mechanism for immunising known target accounts against vexatious complaints?

I think that the entire conversation is wrong. I don’t want anybody to be telling women anything. I don’t want men to be telling me what to wear and how to act, not to drink. And I don’t, honestly, want you to tell me that I needed a gun in order to prevent my rape. In my case, don’tt tell me if I’d only had a gun, I wouldn’t have been raped. Don’t put it on me to prevent the rape.
Content note: discussion of rape, violence and threatening behaviour.

Regular readers already know how much we’ve written here over the years on cyberbullies and their enraged cries about their Free Speech rights being breached whenever somebody declines to publish their bile – bile which absolutely nobody is preventing them from publishing on a blog of their own.

Disingenuous doesn’t begin to cover the hypocrisy of the Women Need To STFU brigade.

There are competing ethical imperatives, and there’s a balance to be found. It is basic courtesy to respect a pseudonym or some in-confidence knowledge about a person generally, but should that expected courtesy take precedence over the protection of other people from harm which could be avoided if they knew what you know?